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bath by
Charlotte Corday, whose pretty head was separated from her body by Sanson a
few days later. On 16 October, Marie Antoinette followed her once-royal
husband to the scaffold.
By the time of my return to Paris in the spring of 1794, when I was once more
free to concentrate upon my problems with Radu, the French Revolution was
entering its most acute phase. The infection known as the Terror was building
to its most feverish height, before it reached its sudden climax in the
Revolutionary month of Thermidor.
One of the events which drew me back to France at just that time was the news
which had reached me concerning a gathering of vampires, which was soon to be
held there.
Simultaneously with word of this gathering there came to my ears an indirect
communication from Radu. His emissary proposed, in his name, that we two
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brothers should take advantage of the conclave to discuss a truce.
Treachery on Radu's part was of course the first idea that sprang to mind when
I
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received this news. Yet at the same time perhaps I was tired I allowed myself
to toy with the idea that it might after all be possible to come to some
agreement with Radu, to reach an armistice if not conclude a peace. Foolishly
I allowed myself to be tempted by the notion that my brother and I might be
able to coexist, however uneasily, in the world.
Constantia too had evidently been invited to the gathering, or at least had
learned about it, and for old time's sake she found a way to let me know.
A hundred years earlier, the protracted feud between the brothers Dracula had
been the subject of much gossip in the small community of European nosferatu;
now the subject was waxing popular once again. In general our colleagues found
it vastly entertaining, if now and then a little worrisome.
One or two of the newer members of the club, though they had recently met
Radu, had never heard of me at all. Or they had heard vague tales of Prince
Dracula (the peak of whose international fame, literary and otherwise, still
lay far in the future) but took it for granted that Radu was the only member
of the family to bear that title, the only Dracula still alive (or "undead,"
if you prefer), and had always been the only one of any importance.
Radu had been giving intense consideration to the problem of recruiting
people, preferably people of proven capabilities, to help him defeat his
brother. In the end, as far as I could piece the facts together, he thought it
best to try to intrigue them with the idea of a kind of hunt. He seems to have
described the upcoming effort as a kind of sporting event it would be fun, and
not very dangerous, to track down the cowardly Vlad (whose, reputation, he
assured them, was based on falsehood!) and torment him or kill him. How well
Radu succeeded in this
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effort we shall see.
I may digress for a moment to remark that now at the time of writing, as the
twentieth century jitters unpredictably toward its close, the study of vampire
populations still offers a fertile field of investigation, though (I admit we
ourselves are partly to blame) facts are often hard to come by. An
investigator of a scientific turn of mind might endeavor to calculate our
probable longevity in terms of half-lives; in using that word I am not
speaking of some supposed twilight existence of the undead, but adopting a
scientific concept which is most commonly applied to the heavy nuclei of
radioactive atoms. A population of such atoms is said to have a half-life of
one thousand years, if its numbers are diminished by fifty percent after the
passage of that measure of time. And in the
Europe of two centuries ago, I now compute that the half-life of the nosferatu
as a group was more than two centuries.
Certainly the scholarly movement, which came to be known as the
Enlightenment, sweeping across Europe in the last half of the eighteenth
century, had brought some decline of belief in our existence, at least among
the self-
considered intellectual elite though not nearly as great a falling-off in
supernatural terror as was produced a century later by the widespread adoption
of the electric light.
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* * *
While still perhaps two hundred yards away from the small group which was
already gathered for the meeting, I could recognize the voice of Radu. No
mistaking it, though he was speaking quietly and his mellow tones had not
graced my ears for many decades. My flesh crept no, I am not a total stranger
to that sensation with a premonition of evil. I listened, paying close
attention,
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as I drew nearer. My brother was engaged in telling a small assembly of our
colleagues his version of our family history a lively chronicle in very truth,
though perhaps not as extravagant as his tales would have made it in an effort
to enlist their support against his brother..
The answers given by the group were skeptical and not particularly
enthusiastic.
Only one of the other voices was that of a vampire I had met before.
Nodding to myself, I paused before joining the small assembly, to take
thought, weighing the several possible ways in which its members might react
to my presence, which to some of them would be totally unexpected. Much would
depend on how much progress Radu had already made in winning them to his
cause. And then, having made some preliminary decisions, I moved forward
again.
Certain students of our miniature society have wondered why I appeared at this
secret gathering of vampires in the traditional clothing of a French priest
wearing a black soutane, which is a cassock, along with the traditional
buckled shoes and a black broad-brimmed hat. My reasons for this choice of
dress were personal; I did not explain them to anyone at the time, nor do I
'consider it my duty to account for them now. It was not the first time I had
worn such an outfit, and several explanations have been suggested, among which
the reader may take her/his choice. The simplest may be that a clerical
identity made certain things easier when one moved in society or at least that
was how things had worked in France before the Terror got under way in
earnest.
Others have speculated that Vlad Dracula was wearing a cassock and a black
priest's hat on that night as a gesture of defiance, simply because the
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Revolutionary government had forbidden such apparel, at the same time as it
required all priests to take an oath of loyalty to the new government.
There is even one quite romantic, chivalric interpretation, to the effect that
I had disguised myself as a priest in the hope of giving a certain real
priest, whom I
knew to be a worthy man, a better chance of getting away from his sansculotte
pursuers, who were determined to deprive him of either his sworn loyalty to
God, or of his life. I can imagine those unfortunate fellows discovering, too
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